Back to Minidisc - Have I gone mad!?

After a few years of various DAP setups inc Ipod classics/touches with amps, various Cowon and iriver palers and even the mighty DX100, I have gone back to minidisc.

I think I may be having some kind of mid-life retro crisis going on(I'm 42).

I recently bought a used good condition RH1 for a fairly good price and a very little used NH600 and I am loving the sound from minidisc all over again. The sound may not be quite as rich and deep as the Ibasso DX100 but I tell you what its not far off on the detail side side of things.

One of the main reasons for my switch was that I found I was never listening to full albums anymore but mainly playlists or skipping through albums.

I also like "retro players" more than even top-tiers. Yes, Ibasso,Colorfly etc have much more power section for driving full-sezed phones. But on IEMs CD, MD, Cassete players give us truely sound.
Yes, we can talk a lot about synergy with our phones, but mostly old-school players sounds much better. Their details + musicality are so lively, mmm:)

I don't think it's all that ridiculous. I used to have a full size Sony MD deck, a recording MD Walkman and a home portable Sony ZS-M50 CD/MD/Radio. I no longer have the Walkman or the Hi-Fi component but still have the ZS-M50. The ATRAC compression at the time I bought the stuff (different bits between 1999 and 2003 I think) was massively better than mp3, it integrated easily into existing home audio and it was affordable.

I never use the MD function of my player now but out of curiosity I just tried it out. The ATRAC compression does still seem quite good though making copies is slow and adding CD-Text type metadata is possible but incredibly tedious. This is an old player and subsequent kit had improved ATRAC compression and easier labelling. I think after I bought a full size deck I never recorded on the portable again.

I would have two major reservations about returning to MD:

The first is the discs themselves don't always last a long time. I spent quite a long period abroad and put my possessions in storage. My MD Walkman had been stolen so I used an iRiver mp3 player while away. When I got home and took my MD players and discs out of storage I found that a lot of the discs had drop outs and noise and some just didn't play. I had a mix of Sony, TDK, Maxell and Traxdata discs. The discs worked OK again after being erased but I realised that this is not a good storage medium.

The second reservation is that the copy protection is incredibly annoying such that simply moving data around is often impossible.

Nothing much wrong with MD players other than having to carry lots of MD cassettes everywhere.. and recording takes so long.. and er transfering too.. although I'm sure the RH1 will have solved some of these downsides.

I used to love my Sony R900 until it died around 15 years ago, I replaced it with the cute E10 player which wasn't quite as good in terms of SQ. I compared my E10 directly with my Sony X1060 recently and the X beat it quite easily, the R900 would have been a lot closer though.

Minidiscs were great at the time but are outgunned in most areas by most DAPs these days Imo

There is a merit of using the minidiscs or other old timers if you can't find the satisfied SQ from all the dap gears you have tried. But but with 128GB CF card for my dap, I can carry so many flac'ed CD's anywhere I go. I can load and unload albums easily and digitally. And I am going green to protect the environment.